Poor Richard. Richard Dawkins, that is. The British evolutionary biologist and professional atheist devoted years of his life to blasting Christianity, and the intellectual left couldn’t shovel enough praise onto his head. But more recently he has begun blasting Islam, and uh-oh! The Berkeley-based public radio station KPFA, the San Francisco Bay Area’s auditory citadel of intellectual leftism, last week canceled its scheduled hosting of a live discussion and book signing of Dawkins latest work, Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist.
On July 20 KPFA sent an email to purchasers of tickets for the event, which was supposed to double as a fund-raiser for KPFA, stating,
We had booked this event based entirely on his excellent new book on science, when we didn’t know he had offended and hurt – in his tweets and other comments on Islam, so many people. KPFA does not endorse hurtful speech. While KPFA emphatically supports serious free speech, we do not support abusive speech. We apologize for not having had broader knowledge of Dawkins views much earlier.
Strangely, no one on the intellectual left complained when Dawkins wrote this, in his best-selling 2006 book, The God Delusion:
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.
In fact, many reviewers just loved it. Witness Joan Bakewell, writing in the Guardian:
He takes on all comers: Aquinas’s five “proofs”, Pascal’s wager (meant as a joke, surely), even Stephen Unwin’s probability of God, whose use of Bayes’ theorem to demonstrate the probability of God Dawkins scathingly dismisses as “quite agreeably funny”…. His scorn for believers is evident throughout. He speaks of “a mind hijacked by religion” and finds “sucking up to God” a strange rationale for doing good. He is, not surprisingly, appalled by the jealous rage of the God of the Old Testament (lovingly putting Abraham to the test of killing his only son) and has sharp things to say about the ubiquitous weirdness of the Bible, “a chaotically cobbled together anthology of disjointed documents.”
All this went down fine until around 2013, when Dawkins tweeted: “I think Islam is the greatest force for evil in the world today.” (The God Delusion had contained some negative commentary on Islamic violence, but Dawkins had been careful always to point out that Christians were just as bad.) More anti-Islamic potshots followed, with Dawkins pointing out that Muslims had won few Nobel prizes and comparing Islam to Nazism. And then someone dredged up a 2010 remark by Dawkins in which he said, “I have mixed feelings about the decline of Christianity, in so far as Christianity might be a bulwark against something worse.”
It took a while for all of this to drift westward to the Bay Area, apparently. According to the New York Times:
Henry Norr, a former KPFA board member, criticized Mr. Dawkins in a July 17 email to the station. “Yes, he’s a rationalist, an atheist and an advocate of the science of evolution — great, so am I,” Mr. Norr wrote. “But he’s also an outspoken Islamophobe — have you done your homework about that?”
Lara Kiswani, the executive director of the Arab Resource and Organizing Center, which is based in San Francisco, also emailed the station last week. She said Mr. Dawkins’s comments give legitimacy to extremist views.
So KPFA dropped Dawkins’s event like a hot halal kabob:
Quincy McCoy, the station’s general manager, did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment. In a KPFA news broadcast on Friday, he said the station “emphatically supports free speech.”
He added, “We believe that it is our free speech right not to participate with anyone who uses hateful or hurtful language against a community that is already under attack.”
Dawkins has been feeling quite hurt by all of this. In an open letter to KPFA he wrote that he had been a faithful listener when had lived in Berkeley for two years, and had even contributed to the station’s fundraising drives. He said that he hadn’t actually been criticizing Islam in those tweets and other remarks but rather, “IslamISM.” He added plaintively:
I am known as a frequent critic of Christianity and have never been de-platformed for that. Why do you give Islam a free pass? Why is it fine to criticise Christianity but not Islam?
That’s a good question, but Dawkins, as a bona fide member of the intellectual left, ought to know the answer.
